A sorceress mates with a shape-shifting beast in the uncompromising second instalment of James’s sword-and-sorcery trilogy
What do you write after winning the Booker prize? A fine problem to have, to be sure, yet the question of how to follow success – of whether to stick or twist, creatively speaking – hardly seems simple, at least to judge by the number of writers yet to publish another novel since winning.
Post-Booker paralysis hasn’t been an issue for the Jamaican novelist Marlon James, now more than 1,000 pages deep into an ongoing trilogy. After winning in 2015 with his third book, A Brief History of Seven Killings, about the attempted assassination of Bob Marley, he thought of writing a “quiet, literary” narrative about Jamaicans in New York; instead came 2019’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf, a gore-slathered fantasy epic in a mythical ancient Africa of warring kingdoms, roamed by a ragtag band of superpower-boosted antiheroes, including a 300-year-old witch, Sogolon, hunting down a swarm of child-murdering demons.
A gruelling, invigorating reading experience rife with contradictions, it widened the horizons of swords-and-sorcery narratives while presenting a lurid vision of Africa to rival anything in the imperialist make-believe of H Rider Haggard. It was hard not to wonder if the fluid sexuality of the central characters, combined with the story’s late-arriving anti-patriarchal thrust, somehow served to green light the excesses of its expletive-laden, groin-fixated splatterfest. Hard not to suspect, too, that the relentless chopping-and-fucking emphasis served as counterweight to a literary artist’s anxiety about writing a book whose ambitions lay not only in decolonising the fantasy genre but also in recapturing the heady rush of devouring Star Wars novelisations and X-Men comics in his youth.
Moon Witch, Spider King, the second instalment, dials down, just a touch, the gut-clenching grotesquerie that characterised the first book. For the most part, it’s an origin story fleshing out Sogolon’s emotional stake in the search for a dead child with which the earlier book began. The action unfolds as a kind of nomadic picaresque centred on her flight from her downtrodden girlhood, in which salvation repeatedly heralds a new form of captivity, whether she’s on the run from her abusive brothers or the royal court where, as a servant, she gets a backstairs view of a succession drama she unwittingly fuels thanks to her lethal telekinetic ability to blow people up from inside, used inadvertently to fend off the predatory head of the household she’s taken into after escaping a brothel.
Like its predecessor, this is a long book, scaled to satisfy the genre’s typically pig-out portions, yet with an uncompromising prose style that shuns easy-reading propulsion. Despite the unglossed vocabulary, the novel’s diction tends to be relatively straightforward: in a childbirth scene, for instance, we read that “everything is wet wet wet and red red red” (typically, we’re also shown “the afterbirth in the corner luring flies”). The difficulty lies more in the book’s enviable confidence that we’ll be able to grasp, say, who’s speaking without the narrative making it crystal-clear, or James’s relaxed attitude to (for example) using three different names for the same character in a single paragraph. Continue reading...
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